Out of eggs and out of butter

Hello, everyone!

This coming weekend we have two different cookies on the menu:  molasses spice cookies, and peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips and peanut butter candies.

The next weekend will also be a cookie-themed weekend:  speculoos, and sweet and creamy cookie dip.

Well, my month-long break from everything else in the world is just about done.  In just two days I start seeing my students again.  This past month has been very productive, though.  I have a list of 7 new foods, I think, to put on the menu.  They are all tweaked and refined and polished, and ready to go.  I will start adding them over the coming days probably beginning tomorrow and adding them one per day, or maybe with a couple days in between depending on what I feel like.

I've got a chocolate snack cake that is not on that list of 7 new items but that I'm really eager to put on the menu.  However, I'm taking my time with a couple tweaks to it, trying to decide whether to make a single large cake and cut it for orders or to make several small cakes in their own vessels.  Yes, it does make a difference.  I made three batches of that cake yesterday, and today I will test them out and see if I can decide how I want to offer them.   

Something very unusual happened yesterday when I finished that third batch of the snack cake.  I discovered I was out of eggs and out of butter.  That never happens.  I always keep plenty of both on hand.  But this past week has been devoted to baking many different items, many of them multiple times, and I actually ran out.  I sat down last night to think about what I wanted to cook and bake today, and then checked to see what ingredients I needed, and lo and behold I saw I was out of those two important kitchen staples.  I could have gone out this morning or set up a grocery delivery, but instead I replanned my weekend tasks, moving several chores from tomorrow to today, and some of today's kitchen activities from today to tomorrow.  I was already planning on being out Sunday morning anyway, so it made sense.

Over the past few weeks, four new items have been added to the menu, but I have been negligent in updating all of you on those items, so here they are:

1.  raspberry sweet cream

2.  focaccia buns

3.  double chocolate pudding

4.  deep dark chocolate pudding

Yes, two chocolate puddings, but they are very different.  And the focaccia buns look a lot like the burger and sandwich buns in the pictures on the ordering site (both are even plated on the same red platter), but that's simply a matter of lighting.  The focaccia buns are a little darker than they appear, and they are totally different than the burger/sandwich buns in taste and texture.  You'll see those on a weekly offering soon, I'm sure.

And today I added the last recipe to my newly developed database.  All 104 recipes for all 104 available items on the website are in a new format and integrated with the ingredient cost information as well.  It's taken me a long time to do that, months, in fact, but it's now done.  Of course, I still need to to back and proofread them, but that task is much less arduous.  

So I'm happy.  Between adding several new items to the menu, cooking dozens and dozens of foods, refining several recipes, and completing that most important work on my database, I am happy with how this month has gone.

July has indeed been a productive month.  But, of course, I still have so many more foods I want to add to the menu for everyone to try.  

Have a great weekend!  And thanks for reading!